~ an enthusiastic meddler exploring photography

Hello again. It’s been quiet here for a number of reasons, which I won’t bore you with other than to say that tedious real life things have been getting in the way of me doing as much photography as I’d really like. And while I had a few draft posts lined up they rapidly got overtaken by events.

So what has prompted this return? Well the title is a dead giveaway – ‘roidweek. Specifically the Spring 2016 Polaroid Week that just finished. For those that don’t know ‘roidweek can be thought of as an online festival of instant photography. As the name suggests it’s a week long, and happens twice a year in Spring and Autumn. Which is which depends on which hemisphere you currently inhabit. I’m in the North so it’s Spring this time around. Based around Flickr groups (a new one for each year usually) it has widened to include Instagram and Twitter.

During the week you share two photographs a day with two rules: they can’t have been shared before (in Flickr terms they can have been shot years before but not uploaded until the week itself) and must be real Instant film; expired Polaroid, Impossible, Instax, peel-apart whatever.

I absolutely LOVE these weeks. The variety of work is amazing, simple portraits and landscapes, macros, street photography, diptychs, triptychs, collages, lifts and manipulations, using all types of film and cameras. It’s truly inspiring and I always find new people to follow. It’s also good from a more technical viewpoint to see how the different Impossible films are working out when, like me, you don’t have the time or money to buy and shoot it as often as you’d like. For example, I’d originally thought of the Impossible round frame films as a bit of a gimmick but having seen some really stunning compositions using it, I realise that used well it provides something quite different from the norm in which every other photo format I can think of is a rectangle of one aspect ration or another.

This last week has been no different. Once again I’ve seen some really amazing dreamy images, and learned some new things. I want to thank all the group admins who make sure that the inevitable cross posted garbage gets filtered out and keep everything tidy as well as picking dates and making sure it’s all set for the next one. I’m feeling a bit more energised than I have been for a while, and some ideas are spinning around unformed for a couple of new projects, so hopefully the interval before the next post here won’t be quite as long.